Category Archives: reviews

In the NetFlow SolarWinds versus Plixer review, a structural approach has been applied to remove all the (marketing and technical) smoke.

If you are going to look into NetFlow solutions, you will be overwhelmed by all the marketing material, sales and other (technical) Buzz. How to make a good selection?

In this blog post, the major selection criteria will be outlined that will guide you through a proper selection process with a minimum of project risks. This information can give you a kick start and boost when you organisation needs some kind of bandwidth visibility (Who is eating my cake?) or forensic network capabilities (Who is stealing my cake?).

In the process we will review, just as an example, a few NetFlow vendors (Plixer, SolarWinds) and use our score matrix to evaluate them against your business requirements.

Top selection criteria

In every project a new system will be screened against the most important selection criteria. The top selection criteria are:

Functionality

Scalability

Usability

Stability

Complexity

Operational cost

Performance

Cost

Integration

Vendor / integrator reputation

Product development

High availability

Impossible requirements

In many projects, impossible requirements (combined) can be put together if you follow a structured approach! And you can still find a (good) solution.

Compare it with the following: I need a car that can fly, drive 280 km / hour and pulls (accelerate) the car from 0 to 100 in just 3 seconds. It should also be possible to carry 60 people and 2.000 kg of luggage. The car should be able to drive in the desert and very rough terrain (forest, hills). It should also be possible that the car travels over water.

Based on the requirements with the right approach it is possible that the best car (based on the requirements put together) is an airplane!

Main NetFlow user groups

The NetFlow functionality can be split into two main categories (in fact user groups):

Network capacity (bandwidth) management. Who is eating the cake?

Security and forensics.

The difference between the two categories: Systems that do only bandwidth management aggregate the data to scale the system. When you aggregate the data, you will lose information that is essential for security and forensics. Systems that aggregate the data are not suited for security and forensic analysis.

The full report Netflow SolarWinds versus Plixer review

I have created a report: NetFlow selection process (a structural approach), in the used case, Plixer and SolarWinds NetFlow solutions are compared against a number of criteria.

If you would like to receive a copy of this document, please contact me.

In this SolarWinds Orion NPM review we have tested version 11.5 and 12.01; The latest version is 12.1

Orion NPM has all the traditional architecture components that we would expect from a network performance management system. A Polling engine, Alerting Engine, Webserver, Reporting Engine and a database. It installs on a Windows server and requires IIS.

One of the key benefits (and selling success) of Orion is that it has a flexible (visual) map that can be integrated into the web-console. Drill down of maps is possible.

The Statseeker review: A network monitoring system that is pretty unknown to a lot of network engineers and IT managers is called Statseeker. What is the position of this network monitoring system in the area of the highly competitive market of network management systems and tools? Continue reading→

History of ipMonitor

For a good SolarWinds ipMonitor review, some history about the product helps to understand the product and its future. In 2004 ipMonitor was a spun-off from DeepMetrix as a stand alone product. In April 2007 ipMonitor was acquired by SolarWinds and ipMonitor fills in the gab for the Orion NPM platform. SolarWinds NPM didn't have WMI, services and application monitoring capabilities in the past. SolarWinds is using the knowledge from ipMonitor to build the Application and Service Monitoring module for the Orion platform. ipMonitor is sold by SolarWinds as an entry level monitoring tool.